It’s not too often that the central hero of a news story isn’t named, so I had to take note of what occurred in the realm of Kiribati politics last month. For much the year, the current president has been trying hard to deport an Australian-born judge—a man who just happens to be married to the leader of the nation’s opposition. On August 11th, the government finally managed to drag the judge, David Lambourne, to the airport in South Tarawa and tried to place him on an outbound Fiji Airways flight. But the plane’s captain wouldn’t accept a passenger who was being forced to travel against his will:
The ongoing separation-of-powers saga, which in recent months has seen the government suspend both Lambourne and the chief justice, New Zealand judge William Hastings, exploded on Thursday morning when police attended Lambourne’s home with a deportation order.
An urgent hearing by the appeal court, consisting of three retired New Zealand judges, saw the Kiribati authorities ordered not to proceed with the deportation.
Immigration officials nonetheless attempted to forcibly place Lambourne on a Fiji Airways flight on Thursday afternoon. After a dramatic standoff – which saw the flight captain refuse to allow authorities to board Lambourne, following which the flight was denied permission to take off – the judge was detained and taken to nearby accommodation. The plane eventually departed.
I have yet to find mention of the captain’s identity, and I assume I never will: As a pilot merely doing his job, he likely desires no publicity. And my hunch is that he knows little about the internecine strife that’s plunged Kiribati into a constitutional crisis. But he knew the code of the skies, and that his chief obligation to protect his passengers above all other concerns. Hopefully someone bought him a grateful drink upon his touchdown in Suva.
More on Kiribati’s slide toward authoritarianism here; things are not going well.
When I parted ways with Twitter back in June, I did so with a post stating that I needed more time to focus on strengthening my parasocial relationships. This was only half in jest: I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time dialed into my headphones, listening to people chatter about great books, bad movies, and everythingin between. This is partly because I’ve picked up a lot more duties on the domestic front as of late, and cooking and cleaning go down easier when backgrounded by someone enthusing over, say, the hottest new striker in the Bulgarian second division. But I also think I’m in a place where I’m seeking that Next Big Something to pour myself into, and listening to people who are genuinely in love with what they’re discussing feels like part of that process.
The show I’ve been gobbling up these past few days is an old favorite that I’d fallen behind on: Abroad in Japan, which touts itself as “the best way to learn about Japan without actually being in Japan.” The episode synopses lean toward the sensationalized, but that’s thankfully not what the two hosts deliver. There’s a real thoughtfulness to their conversations about the minutiae of daily life in Japan, and they always strive to leaven their obvious affection for the country’s unique qualities with fair observations about its flaws. Most important, the podcast reminds me of the power of travel, and of the sort of growth that can only occur when one pushes past anxiety to embrace discomfort.
Also recommended along the same lines: Brian Ashcraft’s Japanese Whisky.
I’ll confess that I once had a dim view of ham radio due to The Simpsons, which never passed up an opportunity to lampoon shortwave operators as insularnerds. (There’s a full-list of animated references to ham radio here; few are flattering.) What changed my mind in recent years is my affection for this site, which regularly posts radio recordings from all over the globe. Entries tend to include brief explanations from submitters, who are clearly proud they managed to capture sounds from that emanated from thousands of miles away. Listening to, say, a Kuwaiti signal that a Canadian picked up in 1970, it’s not difficult to feel the pure joy of discovery.
A recent fave: The Voice of the Galapagos, captured by an operator in Washington D.C. some 42 years ago.
One of the great (albeit infrequent) pleasures of my work is hearing from strangers who have personal connections to the stories I stitch together for a living. Such was the case with Christian Chavez, a Los Angeles City College student who contacted me via Twitter back in April. Christian said he was the grandson of a man named Ricardo Chavez Ortiz, with whom I’m quite familiar: He famously hijacked a Frontier Airlines plane in 1972, and thus earned himself a couple of pages in The Skies Belong to Us.
What was so fascinating about Chavez Ortiz’s crime was the modest nature of his demand: In exchange for his hostages, all he wanted was for a Los Angeles radio station to give him access to a live microphone. He used that opportunity to deliver a rambling, clearly improvised address in which he spoke about the economic hardships he’d faced as an immigrant from Mexico, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his worries about environmental degradation. Once he was done with the 34-minute speech, he politely handed over the unloaded pistol he’d used to seize the plane.
Since Chavez Ortiz wasn’t the main focus of my book, I didn’t put too much effort into finding out what had happened to him after his criminal trial concluded; all I knew is that he was sentenced to a lengthy prison term. Christian told me that his grandfather made it out of federal custody after many years, and that he was working on a piece for his school’s paper about what had happened next.
You can check out Christian’s story here: It’s a deft and moving portrait of a complicated man whose family was forever altered by his rash decision.
One small way I’ve been dealing with the inflation crunch is by scooping up a larger percentage of my books from yard sales. This is how a well-worn copy of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool ended up in my possession; it was strongly recommended to me by a neighbor-turned-vendor, perhaps in part because the terrible film version was mostly shot in our town. (The house in which Paul Newman’s character was raised by his abusive father is just around the corner.)
I sped though the book in a couple of days, despite some issues I had with its slippery tone—it veers pretty wildly between near-slapstick comedy and Dickensian brutalism. (I cried at the end, so it’s probably safe to say it ultimately tilts toward the latter.) It’s nowhere near a Hall of Famer, but this passage will stick in my mind for a long time; rarely have I seen the penchant for self-destruction more elegantly elucidated. It follows the flawed logic of the book’s protagonist, an aging construction worker who is debating whether or not to punch a policeman in the face.
I’m about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don’t have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of the familiar sequence, which was, but I’m going to anyway. And, as always, this third thought was oddly liberating, though Sully knew from experience that the sensation, however pleasurable, would be short-lived. He was about to harm himself. There could be no doubt of this. But at such moments of liberation, the clear knowledge that he was about to do himself in coexisted with the exhilarating, if entirely false, sense that he was about to reshape, through the force of his own will, his reality.
I bought this gem from the same yard sale, though mostly for ironic purposes. I’m a sucker for any work of literature that mentions the Houston Oilers.
There’s nothing particularly novel about the pickle in which I currently find myself. After gutting my way through some major projects this summer, with bewilderingly mixed results, I hit the proverbial wall around Labor Day. Daunted by the challenges of starting anything new, I instead chose to dither—you’d gasp if I told you how much time I’ve recently spent reading up on failed Roman emperors, the making of Bad Lieutenant, and everything in between.
It recently dawned on me that I can’t last much longer in this earthly Purgatory, so it’s time to make some important changes. And one of them is opening Microkhan back up, albeit with a very different mission statement. The goal now is simply to get back in the habit of writing every day: I often feel like weeks fly by without me committing any worthwhile to the page, and that state of affairs leads to a bit of anxiety when deadlines inevitably loom. So starting now, I’m going to aim to start every weekday by jotting something down in this here WordPress blog—a decidedly retro way to try and get myself back on track after what’s been a downer of a stretch.
To make things easy on myself, I’m not going to add any visual material, nor am I going to have any multi-page posts. I may just riff on something I watched or read, or dig up a curio from the bookmarks I’ve been compiling since 2010. I can also foresee scribbling a few earnest thoughts about how the writing game is changing at ostrich-like speed. In short, this is gonna be some public scratch paper for me, a way to work through the doldrums with few rules or expectations. My hope is that a few months down the line, after scores of entires, I’ll be able to look back and realize this exercise played a role in getting me somewhere better.
So: See you tomorrow. And in the meantime, read up on how much people stuck in Antarctica enjoy a good festival.
Yes, still here, and still curious about those portions of the earth that are most unlike my own. Thus my recent interest in the goings on Heard Island, an uninhabited blob that can lay fair claim to the title “Remotest Place on the Planet.” It’s perhaps best known as the headquarters for the Heard Island Feasibility Test, a 1991 experiment that tested whether underwater acoustic signals could be detected many thousands of miles away from their source. (The answer? A resounding yes.) Six years later, a band of ham radio nerds paid $10,000 a head to travel to the island, set up camp, and ping more than 80,000 fellow operators. They came back with a bunch of footage that’s now been captivating me to no end on YouTube. Rarely have I glimpsed such gorgeous desolation.
I’ve been poking around to find first-hand accounts from those few hardy souls who lived on Heard Island for a time—mostly sealers from the early 20th century. If you have any leads on such material, drop me a line.
Cornell’s digital collection of persuasive maps has a lot to sift through, and a great deal of the material is guaranteed to raise eyebrows. (To the curators’ credit, they haven’t shied away from including malevolent propaganda from days of yore.) I’m partial to a bunch of the more lighthearted maps, such as this Greyhound promotional poster from 1935, but today I’m in the mood to highlight William Bunge’s disturbing work. Most of Bunge’s maps are geared toward illuminating the horrible toll of atomic warfare; aside from the image at the top of this post, this illustration of how a poison cloud could envelope Europe tends to stick in the mind.
Bunge was denied tenure by Wayne State as a result of obscenity charges. In 1968 the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklisted him, along with other “radicals,” from speaking on American campuses. (His name was listed between H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael.) At that point, he moved to Canada and became a “nomad cartographer,” seeking visiting lectureships, working with underground publishers – and driving a cab in Toronto.
I’d be pleased to make Microkhan about nothing more than fantastic patent art. My current favorite is the drawing above, take from the landmark 1971 patent for the modern dye pack. The inventors, Harold Robeson and Jerry Birchfield, acknowledge in their application that they were standing on the shoulders of giants: The first dye pack, then known as the “Liquid Protecting Device,” dated back to 1932. But Robeson and Birchfield realized that existing devices needed to be activated with a physical squeeze or by hitting a radio switch with a very short range. That meant the robbers would have their money splattered while still in the bank, and might bug out and start shooting upon realizing that their booty was now worthless.
The Robeson-Birchfield dye pack, by contrast, was the first to be outfitted with a timer, so that it wouldn’t explode until the robber was presumably clear of the premises. It was also small enough to be inserted into a hollow stack of bills, which dramatically lowered the odds that a robber might be able to discover it before detonation.
My big question is whether Robeson or Birchfield ever received their deserved recompense. Biographical information about the men is slim, to say the least; my best guess is that Robeson, who appears to hold the bulk of the IP rights, shifted over to property management before he passed away in 1998. If you have any information about these two under-appreciated geniuses, I’m all ears.
I’ve been revisiting some older movies as of late, in a so-far futile effort to convince Microkhan Jr. that cinema existed and flourished before, say, 2002. In doing so, I’ve become increasingly enamored with the wizardry of practical effects, which are often the product of a sort of technical genius I can scarcely comprehend. The infrequently updated Matte Shot has added to my appreciation of old-school effects, chiefly by illuminating the artistry that went into painting the realistic backgrounds of bygone masterpieces. I’ll confess that most of the movies covered are beyond my knowledge—there’s lots about sword-and-sandals epics from decades before I touched down on Spaceship Earth—but I still marvel at the skill on display. As someone who struggles to draw anything more elaborate than a stick figure, how can I not marvel at someone who can create the entire world of The Running Man with a few paintbrushes?
As part of a new routine designed to get me out of a creative rut, I’m aiming to start each weekday with a short post. Most will be culled from the mile-long list of bookmarks I’ve compiled over the years—an assemblage of arcane papers, defunct blogs, and curious news items that caught my fancy at some point, and which still hold enough import to survive my occasional thinning of the informational herd.
Today’s entry is a site devoted to Communist propaganda books, a topic of longtime fascination here at Microkhan headquarters. I don’t know how the site’s mysterious author got his/her hands on such a trove of materials, but they’ve clearly devoted themselves to scoping up texts about North Korean manufacturing, Soviet Olympic preparations, and Czechoslovakian agrarian accomplishments. Trust me when I say it’s easy to get lost in all the vintage photos, not to mention the sunny captions.
See also: Microkhan on Fortune’s Favorites, the supposed diaries of American soldiers who defected to North Korea during the war.
As is always the case, I had to cut a slew of choice details out of my latest Wired story—the bizarre and alarming tale of a Washington State clinical-trials company that (and this is the vastest of understatements) didn’t play by the industry’s rules. In a lot of instances, material got left on the cutting-room floor for legal reasons—there were tangents I couldn’t confirm with multiple sources, for example. But I also had to lose some great anecdotes simply due to space constraints, with the snippet above being a prime example.
The screenshot comes from the trial testimony provided by a woman who worked for the clinical-trials company, and who was ordered to take home an EKG machine so she could falsify patient data. I remain haunted by her epiphany here: In my mind’s eye, I see her lying down on the floor of her house, the machine’s wires snaking away from her chest. And I see the look of consternation on her kids’ faces as they try to suss out why, exactly, mommy has herself hooked up to this elaborate device.
I urge you to read the story, which I believe hangs together despite missing the EKG-machine thread. It was my attempt to grapple with a question that’s had its hooks in my mind for a while: Why are our most vital institutions so vulnerable to the machinations of sociopaths?
One reason I generally shy away from celebrity biographies is that they typically involve too much authorial sleight-of-hand. Though they’re written in the first-person, it’s always obvious that the actor or athlete or entrepreneur behind the “I” didn’t actually commit any words to paper. Even the savviest ghostwriter can’t help but leave their fingerprints all over the text, and that strikes me as semi-unseemly when the main character refuses to give much credit to their hired wordsmith. (The rare exception here is Andre Agassi’s Open, in which the subject is very upfront about why he hired J.R. Moehringer to write his life’s story, and how he trusted the ghostwriter’s vision.)
The flip side of my aversion to ghostwritten celebrity bios is my affinity for such memoirs that are clearly self-authored. The archetype I have in mind here is Mr. T’s splendid The Man with the Gold, my copy of which I recently unearthed while unpacking from a move. In addition to spawning one of the best publicity photos in human history, the book reveals its author—who makes clear that no ghostwriter was involved on the very first page—to be someone who used the writing process as a messy form of therapy. There are misspellings throughout, plot holes, contradictions, and poor grammar—all evidence that the former Lawrence Tureaud was true to his word about seeking little outside help. (I assume there was an editor at St. Martin’s Press, but he or she was probably mostly interested in rushing the project to press while The A-Team was still hot.) The Man with the Gold may be a country mile from the realm of literature, but it conveys a sense of genuine vulnerability and introspection that’s lacking from most celebrity autobiographies that now overwhelm the front tables at Barnes & Noble.
Re-discovering The Man with the Gold inspired me to seek out other examples of the self-written celebrity memoir genre, which is how I stumbled across the diamond in the rough entitled Life as I Know It Has Been “Finger Lickin’ Good”, by KFC founder Harland Sanders. (I feel a little weird referring to him as Colonel Sanders; after all, we don’t talk about “Colonel Darryl Strawberry” or “Colonel Hunter S. Thompson.”)
I’m not entirely sure why I chose today to re-open this blog after five-plus years of silence. Lord knows there have been many times when I’ve toyed with the idea of popping back up on these august pages, but I could never quite work up the gumption to do so. This morning, though, I realized I’d probably have a spare hour or two between my last interview and picking up Kid Two from school. And what better way to pass the time than by re-connecting with you, dear Microkhan readers, whose ranks can surely be counted on one hand at this point in the time.
So, you might ask, what have I been up to since I last published some of my undercooked thoughts in this blessed space? Well, let’s begin with my most recent doings, and then work our way backwards. And once we get through the boilerplate, I’ll let you know what to expect in the weeks and months to come. (Spoiler: Mostly me using Microkhan as a public scratch paper, a way to work through the zillion ideas bouncing around my head in the hopes of stumbling into my next batch of major projects.)
First off, I’d like to direct you to a story that I started working on back in 2012, but which only saw the light of day this spring. It’s the tale of a bizarre kidnapping and its decades-long aftermath, and it might just be the endeavor I grew to care most about since I abandoned this blog. Even though it’s now out in the world and I’m supposed to move on, it still occupies a huge chunk of my thoughts every day. I’m haunted by what it taught me about the incoherence of evil.
Last October, Wired was kind enough to publish a story I’d been working on for 16 months—the tale of a lonely Appalachian woman acted as a money mule for a crew of Nigerian con artists. That woman, Audrey Elaine Elrod, was lured into the conspiracy by a scammer who posed as a Scottish oil worker on Facebook. Elrod fell head-over-heels in love with this fictional character, who dubbed himself “Duke McGregor.” The crook who played McGregor bilked Elrod out of her paltry life savings, then flipped her into an accomplice who relayed other victims’ funds to Warri, Nigeria. Inevitably, the Feds caught wind of Elrod’s shady financial dealings and prosecuted her for structuring, which is why I had to meet her in a West Virginia prison.
Numerous readers have asked me to provide a deeper take on Elrod’s state of mind throughout her misadventure. Was she genuinely duped into helping McGregor, for example, or did she know full well that her MoneyGrams to Warri were illicit? And more important, was there any point in the enterprise when she realized that McGregor was an utter fraud? The piece is purposely vague about addressing these questions, for I believe there’s never a satisfactory way for a journalist to summarize a person’s motivations and intentions. We know so little of ourselves, so we shouldn’t produce stories that make it seem as if we understand every contour of a stranger’s heart.
That said, I do wish I could have found a way for the story to feature a scene from Elrod’s July 2014 sentencing hearing. For it was there that, in the course of a single sentence, that she revealed volumes about how she viewed her personal conundrum:
THE COURT: Ms. Elrod, let me ask you a question. Why did you do this?
ELROD: Because I thought that [McGregor] cared for me, and if I I didn’t he wouldn’t.
In other words, though Elrod apparently recognized that she was engaging in criminal behavior, she was too addicted to the fictional McGregor’s affection to stop. The kind words that he provided her had become her everything; to lose that illusory love was unthinkable, and worth whatever pain might ensue.
(Also, yes, Microkhan is back for 2016. Thanks for cutting me some slack over the previous 18 months.)
Now that one year has elapsed since The Skies Belong to Us became available for mass consumption, a paperback edition of the book is hitting store shelves from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Gulf of Maine. To celebrate this blessed occasion, I’ve decided to offer some limited-edition goodies to the faithful: signed copies of my skyjacker trading cards, of which there are only a few complete sets left.
Want one? No need to jump through hoops—just drop me a friendly note (brendan at microkhan dot com) with your mailing address and I’ll make it happen. Supplies are limited, so you’re strongly advised to hop to. And once you receive your card, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if you publicly shared a photo of your bounty—The Skies still needs evangelists for the cause.
Last November, my friend Matthew Power and I did a reading together at a crowded, cave-like East Village bar. I opened the proceedings with a couple of passages from my skyjacking book, accompanied by some vintage slides of early 1970s nuttiness—my typical presentation, which the crowd seemed to enjoy alright. Then Matt came up, obviously a bit uncomfortable to be the center of attention, and read a long section from his GQ masterpiece about a psychologically scarred drone pilot. Midway through his performance, it was clear that he had absolutely blown me off the stage—the audience, myself included, was astounded by the emotional depth of the reporting and the beauty of the prose. Over pints afterward, I half-teased Matt about the fact that he had made me look like a chump by comparison. In his typically humble fashion, he refused to accept the jealousy-tinged compliment; he preferred to talk about his upcoming trip to South Sudan, where he would be reporting on the work of Médecins Sans Frontieres.
That night has been much in my thoughts today after learning that Matt died while on assignment in Uganda. He was a giant of contemporary nonfiction, a writer whom I admired and envied to no end for his ingenuity, his artistry, and his all-out commitment to the craft. If you were stuck in a hairy situation abroad—say, held up at a border crossing in Papua New Guinea, or detained by a vigilante patrol in the Philippines—there was no one you’d rather have by your side. But Matt was so amazingly low-key—I imagine he’d be quite embarrassed to hear himself described as anything other than a diligent journalist with a passion for roaming the world.
Matt was also one of the most big-hearted, in-love-with-life blokes I’ve ever had the good fortune to call a friend. The few smiles I’ve had today have come from recalling the Bushmills-fueled conversation we once had about the minutiae of dolphin sex, or the time he turned me into an acrophobe by showing me unpublished photos from his epic urban explorers take. Whenever a meet-up with Matt was in the cards, a good time was guaranteed.
Matt and I had plans to eat Korean food in my Queens ‘hood upon his return from Uganda. Knowing that will never happen makes my heart hurt so much.
When the Indonesian government looks back upon its handling of Mount Kelud’s latest eruption, it may lament its failure to heed a clue from the animal kingdom. Two days before the volcano began to belch its noxious contents, the critters that inhabited its slopes seemed to know that something was up:
“We received reports from people who claimed to see deer and other animals running out of the forest toward their house,” Sakirman, a former Pandansari village chief, said, adding that the occurrence was significant since the volcano is already on a level-three alert.
Hafi Lufi, head of the Malang Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD), said that such an exodus was usually caused by gases rising up from the mountain.
“Smoke may have already been released, so animals have run away from the mountain,” he said. “We’ve prepared masks and evacuation points.”
The BPDB did not, however, order a full evacuation at that point in time—a decision that may well have cost lives in the long run:
Despite the level-three warning, the provincial BPBD has yet to evacuate the 32,000 residents possibly in danger.
“We don’t want to make them panic,” Hafi said. “The status has been raised, but the observation results haven’t shown that an evacuation is urgent.”
I’m sympathetic to this hesitancy to follow the animals’ lead, as our furry compatriots are too often credited with better instincts than they really have. (I’m thinking here of the myth that dogs and horses can predict earthquakes.) But there’s a solid logic to the purported ability of animals to detect volcanic eruptions—their noses are likely more reliable sensors for gas emissions than artificial monitors, especially when those monitors are lightly managed. Perhaps the fleeing deer need to be taken more seriously from here on out.
Follow all the latest Mount Kelud developments here. And pity the volcano’s poor webcam, which gave up the ghost quite early in the process; can’t someone out there develop a protective casing?
While recently pondering the precise definition of the word “deadpan,” I felt compelled to look up a quote that stuck with me as a kid. It comes from Boris Loginov, the coach of the Soviet Union’s motoball team, on the eve of the 1986 Goodwill Games. He was evidently asked to defend his sport, which can seem a bit risky to the uninitiated:
It is one of the least dangerous of motorcycle sports. The most terrible injury is legs being broken. Or sometimes broken collarbones. And the goalkeeper sometimes breaks his hands because the ball is heavy and moves quickly. But we finish the season with the same number of players.
From one of the best-titled anthropological papers of the past several decades, a brief account of one way in which Inuit shamanic gatherings could try the resolve of the easily amused:
On the north shore of Hudson Strait, at Akuliaq, when the masked dancers, there called Ekko, appear “the people are not allowed to laugh … if someone laughs, he will soon die.” In Ujaraq’s account of a Tivajuut festival at Pingiqqalik, near Iglulik, the masked dancers first chased people who laughed and hit them with the whip and the snow knife. Then if they caught two men laughing side by side, they obliged them to exchange wives for the night. According to Aava and Aatuat, the newly formed couples, in other words a man and the partner he had chosen, had to enter the ceremonial igloo, as we have already seen, without faltering or giving even the slightest smile, and then go twice very slowly round the pillar holding up the lamp, keeping their eyes fixed on the lamp. They had to remain as straightfaced as possible, in spite of the most lascivious and grotesque demonstrations of the masked dancers, and the most hilarious tricks on the part of the whole gathering, from whom the cry of “Unununununun …” went up in unison.
A beastly difficult test of mental fortitude, but still preferable to the trial by fire.
Greetings from Los Angeles, where I’m spending a few days working and searching for the perfect shrimp burrito. I need to rush back home via red-eye on Wednesday night, though, in order to pull off a couple of The Skies Belong to Us events. I thought I’d take a moment to share the details of those long-anticipated occasions, in case you want to join in the mirth.
The first event will be this Thursday, November 21st, at the New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan branch (455 Fifth Avenue). It won’t be a traditional reading, but rather a multimedia spectacular featuring 45 rare and awesome images from the golden age of skyjacking. Things kick off at 6:30 sharp.
Then on Friday the 22nd, I’ll be doing a joint event at Brooklyn’s venerable BookCourt with Gregory D. Johnsen, in which we’ll discuss the perils and pleasures of writing about terrorism. The conversation starts at 7 p.m., and I plan on going out drinking in the neighborhood afterwards. If you show up and utter the word “Microkhan” in my ear, I’ll buy you a pint.
Only the most misguided soul would get into the writing game because he or she craves adulation. Plaudits and ego massages are hard to come by in the line of work, and I’m perfectly fine with that. But I’ll confess to feeling a small twinge of excitement upon learning that The Skies Belong to Us is up for a Goodreads Choice Award, thus giving me my first opportunity to win a multi-round competition since my days of varsity baseball. (Yes, this khan was compelled to play baseball, rather than his preferred yak polo—blame the American educational system.)
Being a realist at heart, I know that my skyjacking yarn stands little chance of taking home the top prize—it’s up against many books more beloved. But if I can make it to the final round, I’ll count that as a monster triumph. And if that happens, I vow to post some recently unearthed footage of my childhood appearance on Punky Brewster.
A scintillating deal, though? Please do you part by casting a vote for The Skies Belong to Us, and telling your compatriots to do likewise. And see you back here shortly for some fresh posts on Venezuelan oil exploration, Tasmanian crime families, and counterfeit doubloons.
There’s no question that the Academy for Future Health seems like a rather nutty organization; if Google’s translation of its German-language philosophy is to be trusted, then the Academy apparently believes that the Vatican has ties to extraterrestrials, and that a bunch of elite financiers are hip to an approaching Doomsday. So when police in the Dominican Republic raided the group’s command in October 2012, killing a top-ranking member in the process, it was easy to buy into the government’s version of events: that the Academy was stockpiling weapons, possibly in order to carry out terrorist attacks intended to hasten some sort of Ragnarok. The cops had perhaps saved dozens, even hundreds of lives by heading off the threat posed by these bizarre Germans.
Yet that easy-to-understand narrative has disintegrated over the past year, starting with the release of surveillance video that contradicted police claims that they encountered substantial armed resistance during the raid. Then came the revelation that the cops had seized approximately $1.5 million in cash and goods while taking down the Academy, and that a large portion of that booty had disappeared from official custody.
Now three Academy members who were on trial for attempted murder and weapons possession have been acquitted of all charges by a Puerto Plata court.
It would not be surprising to learn that the Academy did, indeed, have an arsenal stashed in its compound, or that it was involved in activities more nefarious than simply fleecing gullible Germans. But the truth will be hard to come by now that the Dominican police have made such a hash of the investigation. The only real takeaway here is one that you already knew: in the absence of well-structured governmental oversight, there can be a very fine line between cops and criminals.
Given the state’s reputation as a mecca for opioid absuers, you will probably not be surprised to learn that West Virginia leads the nation in drug-overdose deaths. Yet the problem evidently has less to do with the sheer number of narcotics consumed than with a dangerous (and nonsensical) quirk of law:
The state doesn’t allow police and firefighters to administer naloxone, a drug that counters the effects of pain-pill overdoses and saves lives during emergencies.
This is a terrible policy, since cops are typically quicker to arrive on scene than paramedics. Time and again, the evidence has shown that equipping the police with naloxone can significantly reduce the mortality rate among opioid addicts—a fact that is leading an increasing number of cities to adopt the harm-reduction approach.
Just as importantly, West Virginia is the sole place in the country where physician assistants are not allowed to prescribe naloxone (see above). Since overdose victims are likely to encounter such employees at understaffed hospitals before they see actual doctors or nurses, this prohibition can only lead to more sorrow. All of which raises a baffler of a question: who, exactly, is preventing the law from being changed in West Virginia? Whose interest does this serve, financially or otherwise? My best guess is that state politicians are under the mistaken impression that their constituents want addicts to pay the ultimate price for their mistakes. They underestimate the compassion and the pragmatism of those whose votes they need.
A quick Google News search for the term “farm accident” is all that’s required to grasp the perils of working the land. Despite copious safety advances since the early days of the mechanized thresher, agriculture remains a dangerous profession in large part because its essential tasks are often performed by individuals; if something goes amiss, help is often slow to arrive because the victim is trapped in a distant field.
This is precisely the predicament in which Barry Lynch recently found himself. How he coped with the very real threat of slow death should be a lesson to us all:
Barry Lynch, 54, was preparing for a day’s work on an East Feluga cane farm on Tuesday morning when the drawbar of a crop sprayer collapsed on his leg, pinning him to the ground.
With no one in earshot and about nine tonnes of machinery collapsed on his leg, the veteran farmhand was able to remove his boot while deciding on his next move over a cigarette.
“I thought, ‘nobody’s going to miss me until maybe 7pm’, so I started digging,” Mr Lynch said.
Using a pocket knife that had belonged to his father, Mr Lynch dug through the rock-hard surface for the next six-and-a-half hours.
The next time you’re tempted to panic, think about Mr. Lynch enjoying a smoke with 19,842 pounds worth of machinery piled atop his leg.
The exploits of the various Indian sand mafias has long been a topic of fascination ’round these parts. As the subcontinent’s construction boom has lead to an escalation in sand prices, miners have become eager to accumulate the granular material by any means necessary. In practice, that means excavating any strip of land they wish, and using a combination of bribery and violence to deal with those who might object.
One women from Kerala, who goes by the sole name Jazeera, has recently become the public face of opposition to the mafias. She first spent over two months sitting in at the state’s capital, telling anyone who would listen that the illegal miners were destroying her private property. Now Jazeera has moved the show to Delhi, with her kids in tow:
On a bright blue tarpaulin spread out, the 31-year-old crusader is camping with her three children, the youngest Mohammad barely a year-and-a-half old, in this unfamiliar city…
An autorickshaw driver by profession, Ms. Jazeera is also fighting against a part of her own family. Her brother, she says, is part of the mafia that illegally dig sand, so the pressure to call off the protest has been immense even at home. “My husband, a madrasa teacher, supports me. He couldn’t come to Delhi, but my children are here,” she says.
Her daughters — 12-year-old Rizwana and 10-year-old Shifana — have been through the worst, but are not complaining.
They miss being at school, but would rather be with their mother. “Some students from Jawaharlal Nehru University have offered to teach them while we are here. I couldn’t have left them behind,” Ms. Jazeera says.
There is certainly an education to be had in all this, primarily about the interplay between politics and money. Here’s to hoping that Jazeera’s children veer more toward idealism rather than cynicism once the affair is settled.
Fact-checking Tasmania’s claim to be the roadkill capital of the world is no easy feat, since few of its potential competitors (we’re looking at you, Madagascar) keep accurate statistics regarding flattened wildlife. One thing that is certain, however, is that the remote Australian state is a tireless innovator in the roadkill space, dedicating vast resources to mapping trouble spots and figuring out how best to care for victims. Not content to rest on their laurels, however, the Tasmanian authorities are now nudging the ball along even further, by advocating a plan to turn roadkill into compost:
On farm, or just within gardens. I mean, look, people recycle sheep droppings. You regularly see people selling sheep poo on the side of the road. In our local area, those sort of things don’t last long. People are very quick to buy them. So I do think that there’s a market for recycled roadkill, potentially, in Tasmania.
But is this the most efficient use of roadkill? An argument could be made that the poor wallabies, possums, and bandicoots who meet their Maker on Tasmania’s roads might be more valuable as a direct source of calories for humans, rather than a nutrient for future vegetables. The trick, of course, would be to figure out a way to counteract an old taboo against eating meat that was once stuck to asphalt. An enterprising advertising firm should take up that grand challenge.
Contrary to what you may have concluded after several months of silence, I have not, in fact, abandoned this long-cherished experiment in storytelling. I had to shift Microkhan to the back burner during a long summer spent spreading the gospel of The Skies Belong to Us, an endeavor that took me to the far corners of this vast nation. And, to be frank, I had to breathe a bit after the book dropped—that project took a lot out of me, to the point that the healthiest move was to lay off the keyboard for a spell.
But I’m back now and eager to once again bring y’all the finest tales from the worlds of competitive falconry, Papua New Guinea, and the annals of smuggling. While I can’t promise that I’ll have the time to post daily, I do vow to be a much more diligent steward of this prime Internet property. Off to Kansas on a Wired assignment tomorrow, back back at you soon with something delectable. And by “you,” I mean the two or three people who have seen fit to keep Microkhan in their feeds—bless your hearts.
I have honestly been taken aback by the reluctance of many folks to read The Skies Belong to Us while traveling. Time and again, I’ve heard from people who refuse to bring the book on planes, for fear of freaking out their seatmates—or, more important, those meddlesome TSA screeners.
I’m sympathetic to these concerns, but also saddened by them. Simply reading a book of American history should never be an act that arouses suspicions. I would now like to stress that important point by offering y’all a delicious inducement to read The Skies as you transit from one city to the next.
To promote the book, the missus and I designed and printed 100 sets of skyjacker trading cards. There are now just 20 left, and I want to give these limited-edition gems away to brave souls who read The Skies while aloft—or, at the very least, in airports. How do you claim this scintillating prize? There are three easy ways:
1) Tweet a photo of yourself reading The Skies on an airplane or in an airport, along with either the hashtag #TheSkies or my handle (@brendankoerner). I will then reach out to get your mailing address.
2) Tag both yourself and me (+brendankoerner) in a Facebook photo of yourself reading the book on an airplane or in an airport.
3) Send me the relevant photo via email (brendan AT microkhan DOT com).
Yes, you can snap yourself reading the digital version. I’ll trust you to do the right thing and actually download the book, rather than just hold up a sample chapter for the camera. I believe in the innate goodness of our species.
It’s a bit tough for me to believe that The Skies Belong to Us is finally out today. As dedicated followers of this project know, I’ve been working on the book for nearly four years, and there were many moments when its completion seemed an impossibility. The Grand Empress and the progeny can attest to all the dark moods I passed through while shaping the text—they’re saints for putting up with it all.
The notecard above was the seed of the The Skies—the first time I ever jotted down the idea. I pinned it to my corkboard in October 2009, as I do with many random story notions that pop into my skull. For reasons that will hopefully be clear if you check out the book, I just couldn’t let this tale go untold.
Please support the cause if you can. Microkhan is a lovely creative outlet, but it’s the books that should (theoretically) pay for the portable soccer nets that Microkhan Jr. so desperately craves.
From one of the 
Greetings from Los Angeles, where I’m spending a few days working and searching for the perfect shrimp burrito. I need to rush back home via red-eye on Wednesday night, though, in order to pull off a couple of The Skies Belong to Us events. I thought I’d take a moment to share the details of those long-anticipated occasions, in case you want to join in the mirth.
Given the state’s 
A quick 
I have honestly been taken aback by the reluctance of many folks to read 
